I want to back up one HFS+ drive to another, but they are both inside an Ubuntu box, which is my HTPC/File-server. I have all Mac and Linux machines. Anyways, what is going to happen with the resource forks? Do I have to compile a special version of Rsync? I remember doing that a long time ago on one of my Macs. Both drives are inside the Linux box.

I don't want to do a RAID mirror because this second drive is semi-portable and also I don't want it spinning all the time. I'm frugal.

My back-up plan is mount both drives on a Mac and SuperDuper one to the other, but it will probably take 20 years going over the network twice like that. Groan.

This is all assuming HFS+ and Netatalk on Linux is going to work well enough for me. I haven't tried it, but what I've read seems promising (and finicky).

2 Answers
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The latest version, 3.0.6, supports resource forks on HFS+ volumes. You said both are inside the a linux box, so I'd be more concerned with how well the linux HFS+ kernel driver is accurately reading that volume. Is there a reason why you can't put the HFS+ volume in a Mac and rsync from there? Use Carbon Copy Cloner (which uses the latest rsync for some things) to clone the disk to a .dmg on your linux server. You can schedule it to do incremental cloning to that .dmg. You can even use ssh public keys to handle the communication, though I've never done it from Mac to Linux.

That's good to know about the newest version. I only have laptops; This is the only machine I can internally mount drives in. I'm trying to make it the only machine that's Always On in the house too.
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tladukeNov 6 '09 at 17:21

The version of rsync on Mac OS X allows a -E option that copies extended attributes (which includes resource forks on OS X). I'm not sure if this option is also available on the version of rsync that typically ships with Linux OSes or not, but it'll do the job if it is available on Linux.